Profiles of the Unaffiliated

Annie Nelson of the Columbia Tribune (Missouri) profiles a number of people in the region who are unaffiliated with any particular religious group.

They’re not all atheists, but they’re sick and tired of the faith in which they were raised:

Columbia atheist Ken Albright was a little boy when he first started questioning the fundamentalist Christian beliefs being taught to him at the Church of the Nazarene after a Sunday school teacher told him the moon would turn to blood during the rapture, the Christian prophesy of the end times on Earth.

“I thought, ‘I know the moon isn’t made of cheese, so how are they going to do that?’ You know, they talked about people rising up from the dead – what age are they going to be in heaven? … When babies go to heaven, is someone going to have to change their diapers? There are so many issues with the after-the-rapture stuff if you try to apply any logic to it that it falls apart, but most religion does if you apply logic to it,” Albright said, “and I was a logical squirt, I guess.”

…

[Rebecca] MacLeod said she has a hard time reconciling certain religious beliefs, like the fact that her baby niece was born with sin. “She doesn’t know about good and evil, and she doesn’t have to,” MacLeod said.

She can’t accept Jesus Christ being a man and God at the same time, and she doesn’t think there is a way to have God’s word – as in religious texts – without proving the existence of God in the first place.

“I find that there is a lot of beauty and truth just experiencing the world through five senses, and if you need something more than that, then you’re not experiencing what’s happening – the journey, if you will,” she said.

…

Ted Jensen… believes in the teachings of Jesus Christ but said he rarely, if ever, goes to church….

Jensen doesn’t like the intolerance of religions toward each other and thinks religions often can hide irrational thinking like religious radicals. “There’s good religion and bad religion,” Jensen said.

I sometimes get asked if I wish to convert everyone to atheism.

Personally, I could care less if you’re a Scarlet-A atheist or not.

I’d much rather have people of faith shake off the stronghold that religion has on their lives.

Be unaffiliated. Be an ex-Catholic or an ex-Mormon. Be an Apatheist if you wish.

Just don’t let religion run or ruin your life if that’s what it does.

Not every faith or denomination is destructive to society, but many are. The people that leave them don’t have to join our “club,” but the more “nones” we have in this country, the better off we all are.

[tags]atheist, atheism[/tags]

Kate

but the more “nones” we have in this country, the better off we all are.

Really? You think Mike Clawson or Erik would be better people without Christianity?
Hemant Mehta

Really? You think Mike Clawson or Erik would be better people without Christianity?

Would they be better people? Doubtful. Would society be better off if more Christians acted/thought the way they did? Yep, I think so.

It seems more likely to me that more people would become unaffiliated with religion than would become very liberal Christians.
Ceryle

In Australia, we are slightly better off – according to the 2006 census, we have 18.2% of ozzies having ‘no religion’ and 11.8% ‘not stated’ (which doesn’t mean atheist, but just that they didn’t fill in that box). In the breakdown, South Australia (where I live) looks even better – 25% responded that they were not religious.
Maria

amen to that!
Steven Carr

‘….If you try to apply any logic to it that it falls apart, but most religion does if you apply logic to it,’

This is an insult to Christian writers like Paul, who did try to make their religion ‘logical’.

It shows a lack of understanding of religion, which I find a little insulting.

‘When babies go to heaven, is someone going to have to change their diapers? ‘

This is a good question.

Paul was faced with these sorts of problems when faced with Christian converts who scoffed at the idea of corpses rising, and wanted to know what sort of body people would come back with.

So what body would a resurrected baby have?

Christian theolgians tell us that Paul’s answer to such questions would be like saying that the diaper would be filled with the Holy Spirit.

A senseless answer.

But that is what Christian theologians are reduced to, when trying to make the Bible say what they want it to say.

Clearly Paul was saying that people became spirits, not that their baby (or old person’s) body was filled with the Holy Spirit.

So Paul’s view of the resurrection *did* have some logic to it. It didn’t matter what body a baby had now, because it would have a new body come the resurrection (and wouldn’t even need to eat, let alone have its diapers changed)

It is only later (and modern) Christian writers, who insisted on the Gospels view of resurrection as a corpse rising from the grave, who then had to ride roughshod over problems like what happens to babies and old people, and people with one leg etc…
MikeClawson

It seems more likely to me that more people would become unaffiliated with religion than would become very liberal Christians.

I see both happening. Some of my post-conservative peers are moving into more liberal churches (there’s been a large influx of post-evangelicals into the Episcopal church lately for instance), while others choose to remain in their evangelical churches and work for change from within. On the other hand, I know many who are leaving institutionalized forms of church and starting or joining their own smaller intentional communities, house churches, or finding other similar ways of connecting with like-minded people outside of the walls of the church. Statistician George Barna estimates that there may actually be between 5-20 million post-church Christians out there currently who nevertheless find other ways to live out their faith apart from institutionalized religion.